Rat

It’s that time of year. A time when our Northern Hemisphere friends are enduring the slow, steady descent into winter. And while they sadly put away their bikes and hunker down for many months of snowy oblivion, we here on the bottom the of planet are doing just the opposite. That’s right – summer is coming. You can smell it in the air, and unless you haven’t cleaned your leathers from last year, it’s probably the sweet perfume of spring flowers. That’s why this bike instantly caught our attention. There’s something about it that screams summer like a Tourette’s surfer with a loud hailer. The only thing missing from the shots is a case of cerveza, a beach, and a few surfboards. Like a warm breeze, here’s the latest from Spain’s La Raíz Motorcycles.

What’s the opposite of a motorcycle? Have a think about it. Bikes are small, nimble, rebellious, noisy, spiritual and exciting. Now think of something monolithically large, very conservative, whisper quiet, painfully intellectual and about as exciting as a book by Martin Heidegger. That’s right, i’m talking about Universities. Naturally, you’d think that the two would have absolutely nothing in common. But you’d be wrong. The bike you see before you exists because of a university. Namely, Madrid’s Instituto Católico de Artes e Industrias, which accepted a request from one of its students to build a bike for a final year project. That student was Manuel Ayllón, and the bike is probably the most amazing Ducati you’ll see all year.

By all appearances Erik Harland Ludwig of Denver, Colorado, is living a fair approximation of the Man Dream. The 26-year old lives in his shop, ‘Machine Shed’, just him, no women (not permanently, anyway), no potpourri or cotton tips, just tools and grease and auto parts. By night he manages Meadowlark, quite possibly Denver’s smoothest bar, and by day he strips back and builds up, fabricates and assembles. Motorbikes or cars, it doesn’t matter, he loves both. No big surprise then that tearing out of this vortex of gritty cool is this raffish dirt rat, affectionately known as ‘Cowboy’.

Ok, let’s not beat around the bush. There’s an elephant in this custom bike room and we’ll need to get it out in open right now. I haven’t got the slightest idea what a “bolo shit” is. I’ve Googled. I’ve Bing’d, why I even tried an Alta Vista search by travelling back in time. Nada. Now according to the always amusing urbandictionary.com, a “bolo” is a itself a term for pooping, so that would make it’s name “shit shit” which, while quite funny, doesn’t make any sense at all. Then I saw the gun on the tank. Bingo. Another Google search of “bolo gun” tells me that bolo is a nickname for the Mauser C96, better known as “the gun that the Nazis always have in war films.” Except that the gun on the tank looks nothing like C96. So where does that leave us? I’d suggest we just all don these here special glasses that make white elephants invisible to the human eye and click that “read more” link below.

Some bikes are served to us on a silver platter, replete with back story, specifications, build photos, screen shots from the eBay ad, the builder’s mothers maiden name, when she lost her virginity and some original polaroids of the aforementioned event (with handwritten notes), and a professionally shot selection of photos with notes from the lensman himself noting time of day, ambient temperature, and how many beers he’d had with his delicious lunchtime meat pie. Then there’s this bike. You want information? We have just about as little as we possibly could without having nothing but a gaping black hole where our email inbox used to be. The real crime here? It’s that something so arse-smackingly cool can be so damn anonymous – like finding out that the hottie across the room at the party who took your breath away is actually suffering from amnesia.

So, we’ve just had a sweet BM tracker. Let’s continue the Germanic thematic with a bike not made in Deutschland, but perfected there. And with a Red Baron theme, no less. It’s interesting to note that Germany and Japan have an intertwined engineering relationship when it comes to new automotive developments. For almost all the most important road safety developments of the last 50 years, it was the Germans who developed the technology and the Japanese who perfected it. Take ABS as a great example. An electronics system created by Bosch and then installed by BMW on their K100 in 1988 was the starting point for ABS on motorcycles, but it arguably took Honda and their current generation ABS system available most notably on their CBR1000RR to perfect it. Many a professional motorcycle reviewer noted that in their minds it was the first truly unobtrusive ABS system that functioned on track as required without sacrificing lap times. You can see a similar development path for other technologies such as EBD, seat belt tensioners, and traction control. So what happens when you feed motorbike through the system the wrong way around? Oh, don’t worry – the results are better than you think. Meet the JagdBobber.

If we kept a list of “bikes we damn well should post more of” on the wall of the Pipeburn dumpster office, I have little doubt that rat bikes would be at the top of the list. Now this might polarise some of you reader types out there, but rat bikes really push our buttons. There’s just something so amazing about a bike with its original pretenses of polish, prettiness and good looks stripped away to reveal the beautiful ferrous reality of all that metal, rubber, benzene and greased-out muck – like some subterranean-dwelling Nordic earth god has summoned the elemental forces at his disposal to create a means of transport that will simultaneously anger the other gods with its brutality and make them so green with envy they are likely to smite us humans just to relieve their frustrations. This bike does just that. Feast your puny, mortal peepers on Paul Dutra’s supernaturally cool Honda Goldwing Rat, “El Guapo”.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been having a relationship with another girl for years behind my wifes back. I keep her tucked away in a garage up the road and I’m always making excuses to go see her. I could ride her all day long and most of the time I do. Then at other times, it’s just a quickie up to the shops – but always satisfying. You could call her my mistress. My metal mistress. So when Wrenchmonkees sent me an email saying they were building a bike for the Mistress Gentlemen’s Motorcycle Club (MGMC), I instantly related to the clubs name. Not because it sounds like a strip club (that helped), but because I like the idea of a motorbike being a ‘mistress’. MGMC is a fractional ownership club for luxury motorcycles in Lisbon Portugal. You pay an annual fee and you get to choose from the bevy of ‘Mistress motorcycles’. The more you pay, the more quality alone time you get to spend with these bikes over the year. “We have a Ducati Diavel, a BMW S1000RR and a GS 1200, but we needed something unique to complete our fleet” says part owner Gonçalo Henriques. “Our goal was to have a dream garage for our members. First we were thinking of a Harley but we contacted Per from Wrenchmonkees, that we found in a Portuguese magazine called Rev and project Mistress was born!”

Anyone who has visited our fair city of Sydney in the last 20 years will have probably had the dubious pleasure of riding on our mass transit system. Known as CityRail by it’s employees and ShittyRail by the rest of us, it’s main train is the once shiny but now fairly lack-luster ‘Tangara‘, which is an Australian Aboriginal word meaning to go. Which they do, sometimes.Put simply, the trains are old, well-used work horses that are a little dangerous, fairly dirty, jury-rigged and manned by a bunch of nasty-looking guys who aren’t that accustomed to being helpful or courteous. Which brings us to Seoul’s Denver Cho and his well-used, dangerous, dirty, jury-rigged W650 “Tangara” Kwaka – which is more often than not manned by his good self, and by the look of him he’s probably not that good at being courteous either.

Here at Chez Pipe de la Carbon we don’t know much about art, but we know what we like. And we like this; it’s the work of Antoine Stemerding who is an artist living in the south of the Netherlands. His day job involves building weird and wonderful sculptures, most of the time out of metal. So when he came across a 1965 BSA for sale he decided to turn it into a hardtail. “I fabricated the hard tail frame myself” Antoine says. “That wasn’t a big issue, because I work a lot with metal when I make my art. There aren’t alot of chopped BSA’s in the Netherlands but now and then one pops up.”